


heart/soul

by valety



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Heartbeats, Implied/Referenced Past Child Abuse, Other, POV Second Person, Pre-Canon, morbid fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 10:42:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7841617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valety/pseuds/valety
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Humans and monsters are not the same, much to Chara’s consternation and Asriel’s fascination.</p>
            </blockquote>





	heart/soul

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for suicidal ideation, chara's low self-worth, implied past abuse, and references to blood. this fic isn’t gory, but blood IS mentioned a lot, so *shrug emoji*
> 
> I already know the biology isn't perfect, by the way. that's because chara likes acting like a know-it-all. if I got details wrong about how souls work, though, then that's my own damn fault for not being much of a stickler for accuracy or canon lol

When you and Asriel are twelve years old, you go into the city, running hand-in-hand down the cobblestone streets towards the candy shop that sells the gummy slugs he likes so much. There’s a loose brick, of course, and Asriel trips, because if there’s one thing you’ve learned since falling down and starting your new life here, it’s that the prince of monsters is kind of clumsy. If there’s anything to trip or fumble over, then Asriel is guaranteed to do it, leaving you to soothe him when he inevitably bursts into tears.

Usually his spills are of the 'bad bump' variety, leaving him shaken and distressed but not particularly injured. Today, however, he catches himself on the rough street with his bare palms, you having been too slow to catch him yourself, and when he comes to you, it’s with those palms spread wide.

“Chara,” Asriel blubbers. “It _hurts.”_

For a moment, you cannot think.

You knew that monsters did not bleed, but somehow, it had never before occurred to you to wonder what they did instead. As Asriel holds his palms out towards you, what you see is like a smear on a reflection in a mirror, a bruising on reality, not a wound the way you know them. There is no blood, only the gentle spilling of a fine white dust that immediately disappears, and the scrape itself causes the center of his palms to almost shimmer.

It’s strange and horrifying, but although Asriel’s eyes are filled with tears, he doesn’t seem to be afraid. That means an injury like this must be normal, and so you swallow down your twisted awe and catch his hands in yours, lifting his palms to your mouth and kissing them like Toriel so often kisses your own scrapes.

Your mouth comes away dry.

“Oh, gross,” Asriel says, tears already forgotten. He wipes his hands on his pants. Sugar-bright dust catches on his pockets, then fades. “You didn’t have to do _that.”_

You purse your lips and go _mwah mwah mwah_ as you duck forward, mouth coming dangerously close to Asriel’s cheek, and he squeals and runs ahead of you. You begin to run as well, not wanting to let him get too far without you, and for a while, you almost manage to forget, too absorbed in first chasing him down and then figuring out how best to stretch out the fistful of gold you have between you. Yet as you’re walking home afterwards, carrying a small grocery bag of candy, you once again catch sight of Asriel’s hands, this time as he tears apart a gummy to share with you.

He doesn’t appear to be in pain, and as far as you can tell, his hands seem corporeal enough. But he doesn’t bleed, so what does he look like on the inside? Does he have cells? Lungs? A heart?

He has a heart, at least. Or something very much like one, anyway. Whatever it may be, it beats a little faster when you touch him, even when you’re only placing a hand on his shoulder so that you can brace yourself while standing up. But why does it beat, if Asriel has no blood? What does it pump? What purpose does it serve, whether it’s a heart or something else?

On the surface, humans would say that love comes from the heart. They spoke of doing things wholeheartedly or breaking someone’s heart, as though feeling such emotions wasn’t just the product of firing synapses or however the heck the brain works. They looked at you and called you heartless, and if feeling love is the way that people measure such things, then you guess you are.

But looking at Asriel—small and sweet and innocent, with a heart whose purpose you cannot possibly conceive of—you can almost believe in an organ that’s made entirely for love.

 

 

* * *

 

 

You keep a list of your deficiencies, a mental record cataloging all the ways in which your human body comes up short compared to monsters. That night before dinner, when a knife slips as you’re helping Toriel cut carrots and and you accidentally cut a finger instead, you add 'bleeding' to the list. Asriel’s fall from earlier had been a strange and lovely thing. Your own injuries are just gross in comparison.

It’s surprising that Toriel knows to bandage it, you note as she fusses over your injury. As far as you know, monsters don’t use bandages. But you guess she’s fairly old, maybe even old enough to have once known humans herself. Maybe blood is nothing new to her.

It’s certainly new to Asriel, who begins wailing the moment he sees red.

“Chara’s soul is coming out!” he sobs as Toriel applies the bandage, having apparently forgotten that he’s meant to be cutting celery.

“Their soul is not coming out,” Toriel says patiently, not even bothering to look up from your hand. “There, that should be fine. Be more careful from now on, alright?”

“Their soul dripped everywhere! We have to put it back, we have to—”

“Don’t _do_ that!” you cry before Asriel can attempt to scoop your blood into his palms. He freezes, hands hovering above the cutting board. “It’s fine! It’s not my soul! It’s just blood!”

“Blood?” Asriel sniffs, hands beginning to waver. “What’s that?”

“That is something we can discuss later,” Toriel says briskly, placing her hand on his shoulder and steering him back towards his station. “For now, we have dinner to finish preparing. Please attend to the celery.”

Asriel doesn’t look particularly reassured by his mother’s dismissive attitude, even though he should know better than anyone that she wouldn’t be so brisk if she weren’t confident that you’d be fine. Still, he _does_ return to chopping celery once you yourself return to chopping carrots, and so you guess it’s fine.

He doesn’t bring it up again until after dinner, although that might just be because Toriel keeps the two of you busy the entire time she’s cooking. He attempts to make eye contact with you several times during the meal itself, but there are no pauses in Toriel and Asgore’s conversation in which he can situate himself, and you don’t feel particularly inclined to help him, meaning Asriel is forced to wait until after you’ve finished helping clear the table to bombard you with questions.

He’s fairly clever about it, for Asriel. He gets you alone under the pretense of wanting your help designing costumes for a new character of his, and although you suspect you know what he’s up to, the allure of such a proposition is too much for you to resist. So you follow him to your shared bedroom, watching as he gets out his colouring things and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He manages to hold off for five entire minutes before asking, with carefully feigned casualness, “Hey, Chara?”

“Yeah?”

“Is blood a private thing?”

“No, Asriel,” you say, adding spikes to the gigantic shoulders of your drawing. “Blood is not a private thing.”

“I thought maybe it was, cuz mom didn’t want to talk about it.”

“I think that was because the soup was boiling over.”

“Well, maybe,” Asriel generously concedes, adding yet another rainbow swirl to his own drawing. It doesn’t look as though he’s made much progress on the costume front, being too busy adding embellishments to the single robe he’s drawn. “But if it _was_ a private thing, I’d understand, and I’d apologize for accidentally seeing it.”

“I guess it’s a good thing that it’s not,” you say, the corners of your mouth twitching. You reach for another crayon, this time black, so that you can add some cool black flames behind your guy.

“But if it’s not a private thing, what _is_ it?”

“It’s just something humans have,” you reply. “It’s like our version of dust. Honestly, Az, you couldn’t work that out yourself? You _knew_ I didn’t have dust, right? Humans and monsters are pretty different.”

You try and look knowledgeable about the matter, as though you yourself hadn’t only worked out that monsters don’t have blood this morning.

Looking flustered, Asriel says, “I...I never thought about it. I guess it never occurred to me that you _were_ different.”

Maybe someone else would have been insulted, to hear themselves so carelessly compared to monsters. But as for you, you blush, and with uncomfortably warm cheeks, you say, “Oh.”

“I mean, I know you aren’t!” Asriel says quickly, looking alarmed. “I guess a human wouldn’t want to be compared to a monster, ha ha...”

“No,” you interrupt, shaking your head. You force yourself to smile. You try and make it kind, to reassure him, but you’re not sure if you get it right and you drop it a moment later. “No, I don’t mind. I’d rather be a monster than a human.”

“Really?” Asriel asks. He frowns. From where he’s kneeling across from you, he weaves his fingers together in what you now recognize as one of his many anxious gestures. “Why?”

You consider.

Human beings are ugly, you decide, and human suffering is an ugly, messy thing, full of bruises and scars and dripping, staining blood. But monster suffering is almost elegant, with falling dust that shines like diamonds. You can’t imagine what death to them would look like, but in your mind’s eye, you see them fading as the snow melts in the sun, totally and utterly at peace. A cleaner death than you could ever have to look forward to, and very likely a kinder one, seeing as how death on the surface is almost always the result of cruelty or negligence. You can’t imagine such violence or hatred existing down here.

But that answer seems complicated.

“I don’t like humans,” you say instead. “For a lot of reasons. Monsters are better.”

“But humans are so strong!”

You laugh at that. It’s a short, nasty, barking sound, and you tear your crayon so hard across the page that it almost rips. “Maybe _some_ are,” you say. _“I’m_ not, and nobody on the surface would think I am, either. I’m weak, and stupid, and…”

“You’re not!” Asriel interrupts. When you lift your head, his eyes are hard. He leans forward, placing his hands over your own. Only then do you realize that you’re shaking. “You help me all the time! And you’re brave and smart, and really cool, and that’s all that matters! Who cares what people on the surface think? _I_ don’t!”

Despite the ferocity behind his words, Asriel’s lips are trembling, as though he’s afraid that someone on the surface will somehow hear him and get mad. So you smile—it feels easier to make it kind this time—and slip your hands out from under his so that you can clasp them instead.

“That’s really sweet of you to say,” you tell him, and Asriel visibly relaxes.

He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get that it doesn’t matter what you are, only how it causes others to respond to you. He doesn’t get that people look at you and see only vulnerability. He doesn’t get that you have seen your own blood too many times to have any illusions left about your strength. He doesn’t get it because he lives in a clean storybook world in which kindness is the most potent weapon of all.

But it’s okay that he doesn’t get it. There’s something almost charming about the fact that such naïveté can still survive even in the face of something broken like yourself. His nature is a hopeful one, and it makes you feel like you could someday feel hope again yourself. 

You drop his hands, returning to your task, but Asriel doesn’t do the same. Instead, he returns to twisting his hands together, looking so nervous that you want to bop him on the snout and tell him to relax already, geez. 

“Um,” he says at last. His drawing is still pushed over to the side, and so you set down your crayon and push your own aside as well. You guess drawing had only ever been a pretense, after all. No need to carry on at this point. “I’m...curious. How is blood like dust? It’s... _not_ dust, so…?”

“It keeps us alive,” you explain. You rest your elbows on your crossed knees, propping your chin up with your hands as you stare at him. He won’t meet your eyes. You don’t know why. Is he still wondering if blood is something secret and taboo? Is he embarrassed to be asking? “It carries things we need throughout the body, like oxygen. I guess it’s not _that_ much like dust, actually, but it’s probably the closest thing we have.”

“That’s amazing,” Asriel says.

You snort. It’s the kind of thing that you would say sarcastically to make someone shut up, and yet _he_ says it with complete sincerity. Trust Asriel to find your vague memories of sixth grade biology fascinating.

It’s something of an ego boost, if you’re being honest with yourself, and so you lean forward and reclaim your paper and your crayon. You flip the page over and begin to draw a diagram: a shoddy one, with just an outline of a human being and  a couple of arrows, but Asriel watches as you draw with rapt attention.

“Human beings have hearts—" and here you tap the center of the diagram, where you drew a simple, unrealistically shaped Valentine’s Day heart. "—that pump our blood, pushing it all throughout our body, and the blood carries oxygen and nutrients and stuff to all our other organs. That’s called the circulatory system. It’s called a _system_ because everything inside us is connected. If even one thing stops working properly, we could die. I think the heart is probably the most important part, though. It can never stop beating, because—“

“It looks like a soul,” Asriel interrupts.

You glance down at your drawing.

“That’s not really what it looks like,” you say, cheeks growing warm for the second time in about five minutes. “That’s just...I don’t know. That’s just how people draw them.”

Suddenly embarrassed, you scribble out the heart, then crumple up the diagram.

Asriel looks disappointed for a moment, then says, “I don’t think monsters are that complicated. All we have are souls. Do you want to see?”

“See what?” you ask.

“My soul.”

“You can’t show me your _soul,”_ you say, tossing the crumpled page aside. “That’s not the kind of thing people can _show_ each other.” Then: “Wait, is it?”

“I can take mine out,” Asriel says. He doesn’t even say this particularly confidently. It’s simply matter-of-fact, like removing one’s soul is a simple, everyday thing that’s not even worth bragging about, despite how desperate he usually is to impress you.

Without waiting for a reply—which you guess is for the best, as you’re too surprised to give one—he cups his hands over his chest, closing his eyes in concentration.

There’s a burst of light, and then suddenly, Asriel is cradling what seems to you to be a fragment of a star, clean and gleaming and white, like a shard of diamond in his hands. It pulses, throbs, flickers like a flame, and almost shyly, he says, “You can touch it, if you want.”

You cannot speak.

“I can’t,” you say at last. Your throat is aching, as though the mere sight of his soul makes you want to cry. It _shouldn’t_ —apparently this much is commonplace for monsters, judging from how easily he did it—and yet all you can think is that whatever’s left of your own soul, if you ever had one to begin with, is not fit for sharing with this star-bright prince.

“Oh,” Asriel says. He sounds disappointed, but his expression is carefully neutral, as though he’d been expecting your reply. He once again presses his hands against his chest, pressing the starlight back inside of him, and then it’s gone and he smiles at you as easily as ever.

“I can’t take out my heart,” you say. You don’t know where the words are coming from; you will yourself to stop, even though you know you won’t. “But I can still show it to you, sort of. If you want.”

“Really?”

You lean forward and grab Asriel’s wrist. He yelps in surprise, but you ignore him, pressing his hand flat against your chest, praying that you’re not making a fool of yourself. Your heartbeat is a steady thrumming in your ears, and you think, _please, please let him be able to feel it too._

You hold his hand there for a moment longer, and Asriel looks confused. But gradually, his eyes begin to widen.

“Oh,” he whispers.

“Can you feel it?” you ask.

“That’s your heart?”

“Yes.”

“And it never stops?”

“Nope.”

“Wow,” Asriel breathes. “That really _is_ amazing.”

“It’s not _that_ amazing,” you mumble, willing your blush to stay down. 

“It is!” he protests, and he gazes up at you with wide, admiring eyes that make you feel unspeakably small. “Every little part of you is working to keep you alive! No wonder humans are so strong!”

It’s almost painful, how earnest he sounds, and your throat once again begins to ache.

“Yeah,” you say at last. “I guess so.”

A wave of something dangerously close to relief is beginning to slip over you, although you couldn’t possibly say why. It’s a relief to not look like a fool, you guess. An even greater one to have Asriel’s approval—to have him look at you as though you’re magic and have given him some wondrous gift, not as though there’s something morbid and grotesque about you showing him the thing that keeps a shambling wreck like you alive.

”It’s getting faster,” Asriel says, pressing his hand a little more firmly against your sweater. “I think my soul does this sometimes too, but...it’s only when I really _feel_ something. I can’t imagine it never stopping. Doesn’t it drive you crazy, to always have something jumping in your chest?”

“Maybe I don’t,” you say. “Maybe I’m just really feeling something right now.”

Asriel jerks his hand away. You burst out laughing.

“You’re funny,” you say, pressing your own hand against your chest once more. Your heart is still racing, you observe: jumping and skittering along like a pebble skipping across the surface of a lake.

“You were joking, right?” Asriel asks, cradling his hand as though burned. “Your heart _always_ does that. Because of the circulatory thing, right?”

“Yeah, it does,” you say. It’s half a lie, half not. “Like I said, it has to. Everything is connected. If even one thing doesn’t work properly, there are problems. And for the record, that was a heart.”

“Huh?”

“You said your soul does this _too,”_ you point out. “That was a heart, not a soul. I don’t have one.”

“Oh.” Asriel frowns, letting his hands fall into his lap. “That doesn’t sound right. Mom and dad said humans have souls too.”

“Well, maybe others do,” you say. You let your own hands fall into your lap as well, imitating him. “But I’ve never seen mine, and...well, I probably don’t have one, is the point.”

“I can teach you how to take a soul out, if you want,” Asriel says. “That way, if you have one, you can show it to me. I bet it’s really pretty.”

You’re not sure how to respond to that.

“That would be nice,” you say at last, voice stiff.

Across from you, Asriel’s expression turns shy. He meets your eyes and quickly looks away, but it’s not the flustered panic of when he realizes he's said something embarrassing. Instead, it’s almost hopeful.

“Can...can I feel your heart again?” he finally asks.

You smile, faintly, and once more take his hand in yours. 


End file.
